How the Future Henry V Began His Royal Career

On October 11, 1399, the 13-year-old who will become Henry V, is knighted for the second time. This is unusual. Then again, everything in England is unusual at the moment.

The parliament assembled to do away with King Richard has done its job. On Michaelmas, September 29, Richard was visited in the Tower of London by a delegation of lords, bishops, knights, and learned doctors, and asked to vacate the throne. An official account, known as “The Record and Process,” stated that he agreed cheerfully to do so. A less partial witness recorded that Richard was in fact “greatly incensed.”

He had previously harangued visitors to his rooms with complaints that England was “a strange and fickle land” given to destroying its greatest men. Now he demanded “to have it explained to him how it was that he could resign the crown and to whom.” Bolingbroke visited later to do just that, and his answer was blunt: it was happening, there could be no negotiation, and Richard needed to get on with it.

The following day, Parliament met in Westminster Hall. The assembled estates of the realm were told that the king had renounced his title and handed over the signet ring that symbolized his majesty to Bolingbroke. Would they accept his decision? “Yes, yes, yes,” they yelled. Speaking in English, rather than courtly French or clerical Latin, Bolingbroke proposed himself to be the new king, on three grounds: “that I am descended by right line of the blood” from the thirteenth-century king Henry III; “that God of his grace has sent me, with the help of my kin and my friends to recover it”; and that had he not stepped up, England would “be undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws.”

The throne stood empty in the hall, draped in cloth of gold. Bolingbroke’s fellow former exile Thomas Arundel, acting as archbishop of Canterbury, led him to it. Bolingbroke sat, to more cheers, and Arundel preached a sermon. England would now be ruled by grown-ups, he said. “When a boy reigns…willfulness reigns and reason is exiled…constancy is put to flight and then great danger threatens. From this danger we are now liberated, for a man is ruling.”

Henry’s second knighting takes place eleven days after all this, on the weekend preceding his father’s coronation on Monday, the thirteenth. He is one of forty-six new knights made that day, three of whom are his brothers: Thomas, John, and Humphrey. It must be exciting for the siblings to be back together. Yet they must also realize that their father is striving to make a clear, serious break from the vapid foppery of his cousin’s reign, and that they are expected to play their part in this tone change.

The ceremony, which takes place at the Tower of London, is elaborate and serious. The boys bathe, take instruction on the duties of knighthood from older men, keep vigil in one of the Tower’s chapels, make confession, and hear mass before they can be dubbed with a sword. They are thus inducted into a new military fraternity, which will one day become known as the Order of the Bath.

Of the forty-odd other young men knighted alongside Henry and his brothers, many are of their generation, and several are the scions of families who have suffered under Richard. They include the eldest sons of the Appellants of 1386: Thomas FitzAlan, seventeen, heir of the murdered earl of Arundel, and Richard Beauchamp, also seventeen, whose father is the exiled earl of Warwick. Had Henry’s cousin Humphrey, his companion in Trim Castle, survived their trip home from Ireland, he too would likely have been a part of this grand occasion, for it represents the honoring of a youthful aristocratic generation who will in their own turn carry the collective burden of ruling England.

On the afternoon of Sunday, October 12, Bolingbroke’s coronation procession begins. Despite lashing rain, Henry and his brothers set out with their father from the Tower of London, where Richard still languishes, to ride through London and out along Fleet Street to Westminster. Henry is at his father’s side as they and thousands of others proceed slowly along streets hung with colorful, expensive cloth and lined with fountains that bubble with free wine. Henry, his brothers, and their fellow Knights of the Bath wear green, priestly cloaks. Their father wears gold. His head is bare. Around his neck hangs a pendant advertising his grandfather Edward III’s claim that he and his successors are also kings of France.

Right now, for Bolingbroke, just being king of England will do. The party arrives at Westminster and the king and his sons lodge in the abbey for the night. The next day, Monday, October 13, the coronation proper takes place. Bolingbroke is taken once again to a throne draped in gold cloth. He is stripped to the waist and anointed on his torso and head with holy oil supposedly given by the Virgin Mary to the martyred archbishop Thomas Becket more than two hundred years previously. He is invested with all the treasures of a king: spurs, scepter, staff, slippers, bracelets, and a crown made for his cousin Richard.

Henry is at or near his side for all of this, carrying Curtana, the same ceremonial sword Bolingbroke bore at Richard’s coronation. Then he and his brothers ride at the head of the procession accompanying their father, now King Henry IV, from the abbey church to Westminster Hall for a feast of incredible variety. Here Henry stands behind his father once again as the banqueting party devours chickens, herons, egrets and even eagles, boar’s heads, venison, and rabbit. He continues to hold Curtana throughout, while beside him stands Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, bearing the sword Bolingbroke held when he landed in Yorkshire on his return from exile.

It is surely an exhausting, perhaps bewildering, time for Henry and his brothers. Henry is still only thirteen. Thomas is twelve, John ten, and Humphrey has just turned nine. It has been only one year since their father was exiled, their lives upended, and their futures thrown into uncertainty. Now their father is the king, and they are knights and princes: the nucleus of a new Lancastrian royal family. Nothing like this has happened in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

The case Henry IV made to the parliament and the realm to justify what he has done is that by right of blood, conquest, and suitability, he and the house of Lancaster deserve their newfound royalty. Some of his partisans argue that in fact this dynastic revolution was inevitable, foretold eons ago by the Arthurian wizard Merlin. But what has been justified by rhetoric must now be clung to by action. Archbishop Arundel has preached that the realm will be governed by men. If the new princes want to take some part in this, they will have to grow up fast.

This applies particularly to Henry. Parliament reopens immediately after his father’s coronation, and one of its first pieces of business is to lavish titles upon him. He becomes Prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Chester. A few days later he is awarded the duchies of Lancaster and Aquitaine (also known as Guyenne). His right to eventually succeed his father as king is approved, confirming that Henry IV’s kingship is a full dynastic revolution and not the beginning of a form of electoral monarchy in England. Henry even has a mini coronation of his own: in recognition of his new position he has a little gold circlet placed on his head and his father gives him a ring, rod, and kiss of peace.

So there is no escaping it. At thirteen years of age, Henry has progressed from boyhood with his mother, playing his harp and wearing a black straw hat, through a short and topsy-turvy adolescence full of loss and peril, to have adulthood thrust upon him. He is heir to the crown, and the ennoblements heaped upon him are real. He is not to be a Ricardian duketto, but a working prince: apprenticed and thrown into the fray immediately, fighting to help his father keep hold of a crown that is about to be contested on many sides, all at once.

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From Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones. Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. © 2024 by Dan Jones.